by Ted Sherman

Created on: April 27, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

My two-word answer: Hell, no! It isn't so much the actual programming that is trash, although some of it certainly is. The monster that is eating up TV and regurgitating it on the poor watching public is advertising.

When I started watching TV in the late 40s, the infant industry was mostly just radio with pictures, with a big helping of old-time vaudeville tossed in. The most popular prime time shows starred radio personalities, including Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Red Skelton and Bob Hope. There were also programs based on the tried-and-true Broadway reviews, such as "The Ed Sullivan Show", Sid Caesar's "Your Show Of Shows" and "The Dean Martin Show."

What those old programs had that has disappeared from today's TV was non-intrusive advertising. In those days, commercials during prime-time hours took up about five minutes of each hour. They were often live, humorous, with the star pitching the product. For instance, Bob Hope's ads for Pepsodent, Jack Benny's for Jello and Milton Berle's for Texaco.

Today, commercials hog at least 20 minutes of each prime-time hour. I won't even talk about the obnoxious late-night and home shopping channels, which are total commercials and, for me, totally unwatchable. Today's sit-coms, sports events, quiz shows and reality programs are all loaded with commercials.

The ads are disgusting enough with their content, hawking all kinds of phony medicines, gas-guzzling SUVs, male horniness pills, useless diet supplements and more garbage an old-fashioned snake-oil salesman would've been ashamed to sell. But what makes TV unwatchable is that the exact same commercials are repeated over and over and over and over again. Often, when watching a sports event, I'll see the same boring ad come on three or four times within the same hour. How stupid do the ad people think TV watchers are? Do we need to be bombarded so often with the same words and pictures, that in self defense, we'll run out and buy the stuff?

How many times must I see that two-mile-a-gallon '07 clunker climb a mountain or go through a muddy road? Or four old golfers who can play all day without once having to go to the toilet because they took some kind of pill? Even the so-called public service ads are part of the boredom. How often do I need to see some sincere schlub agonize over his addiction to cigarettes, or a bunch of volunteer hawkers endlessly trying to get me to contribute to public broadcasting?

Fortunately, the coming of the DVD has eased the pain a bit. We have a subscription to a DVD club, and get several new movies a week. When TV gets too bad, which is virtually all the time now, we can just sit down and play a movie. Of course, if we can first fast forward through the all those damn ads for other movies, so much the better.

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